Yik Yak copycat arrested Friday

Another Mobile area student has been arrested in connection to a threatening message posted Thursday to the social media application Yik Yak, Mobile County District Attorney Ashley Rich said.

A 14-year-old was arrested Friday afternoon for posting about a possible shooting at an area school. Rich said the suspect appears to have been copycatting an incident that led to heightened security at five area schools on Wednesday. That incident resulted in the arrest of a 16-year-old student.

The 14-year-old suspect was taken to Strickland Youth Center and will face a charge of making a terrorist threat, which is a Class C felony.

Rich said the investigators were able to determine where each of the posters were when the threats were made because the app requires users to turn on the location services of their smartphones.

“Both posts were made from home,” Rich said.

Rich didn’t name the threatened school, but said additional on-duty and off-duty security were on campus Thursday.

“There was a lot of time and money expended to make sure the students were safe,” Rich said.

About The Author

Rob Holbert is co-publisher and managing editor of Lagniappe, Mobile’s independent newspaper. Rob helped found the newspaper after a career that started as a police reporter and columnist at the Mississippi Press in Pascagoula. He followed that with a stint as a deputy press secretary for then-U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott in Washington, D.C.
After leaving Capitol Hill, Rob worked ghost-writing opinion articles for publication in some of the nation’s largest newspapers. From 1999 through Aug. 2010 he was the faculty adviser for the University of South Alabama student newspaper, The Vanguard, and in 2002 started Lagniappe with his business partner Ashley Trice. The paper now prints 30,000 copies every week and is distributed at more than 1,300 locations around Mobile and Baldwin Counties.
According to Scarborough Research, Lagniappe now has more than 80,000 readers each week, with close to a quarter of that coming online. The paper began publishing weekly at the beginning of April 2014.